Adventure in Soundland

Spent all day yesterday downloading Ubuntu Studio, took 9 Hours, and then this morning I found a disc on trademe for $6.30.

The guys work out of Massey uni and offer a choice of three Linux disc’s, CD or DVD, for ten bucks so I credited a paltry 10 bucks and asked for Ubuntu Studio on DVD and a CD or two of OS’s that’ll suit my desktop and browsing, storing etc.

Then all I needed was a driver backup program to get all the installed drivers copied, on both ‘puters, so when I reformat and load Linux I’ve got driver CD’s for all the installed hardware ready to go.

In the end the process was made remarkably simple but it took 9 hours of downloading then an hour or two trying to figure things out after trying to figure out what I needed to learn and thanks yet again to those geeks and nerds who hang out at forums just to let you know how clever they are and how stupid you or… timewasters who aren’t needed by anyone except their own Mummies!

I know it’s a process of learning thats going on and I’m glad I’ve kinda finally got the concept of Occams razor down and it’s being brought into reality sooner than I used to bring it. For the Ubuntu studio I finally asked myself what do I want? Answer; I want a DVD with the program on it. Do I have to burn it myself after downloading? Answer; not if I can find a copy in NZ… look on trade me.
The question of drivers took me a little longer to understand and as usual it came down to nomenclature. The question is that ,because any working computer already has the hardware drivers installed, then there must be a way to get those drivers off the hard drive and ready to be reloaded after reformatting and install of an operating system. There is and it’s called driver backup. It’s not a restore drivers or system backup and thats where nomenclature is a pain in the ass and lots of searches and reading of posts in forums eventually got me to driver backup.

Drivermagician Lite
The program I used is quite nifty as it isolates all the drivers and highlights all the hardware drivers as opposed to the OS drivers. So you then just tick all the highlighted boxes and push play… or begin, I can’t remember. But before you do that it’s an idea to create a folder called hardware drivers or somesuch and stash it somewhere close to the top of a directory, like in my documents, then browse to it and hit play. Then just burn it as data and let the fun begin.
Took me a while to figure it all out that but I suppose I’ve learnt and thats what counts.

The thing that got me going about a laptop was discussing the options with Felix while driving back to Raglan the day after the opening at Pierre’s. Felix suggested a desktop in a travel case and that had me remembering one of the chaps at Fleet FM who was into military spec ‘puters the size of a lunchbox way back in the Odeon cafe days.
Tonight I found Ubuntu studio and while looking into that I’ve now cottoned onto the idea of recording studio software and ever operating system software being able to be loaded from CD’s…
This means that you can load your collection of software, complete with operating system, onto a CD or even USB flash drive, then plug it into any PC and boot from the CD or flash drive… amazing.

Given though that you can pickup laptops from trade me with depleted batteries nice and cheap then the alternative of building a PC could be quite costly, relatively speaking, but the fact remains that HD’s are noisy and power supplies are dirty so the idea of a small box to attach a Small screen, keyboard and mouse to is quite an interesting one as well as the idea that much older PC’s with 1/4 Gb of ram and processor speeds well under 1/2Ghz are really cheap and easy to pickup then these ideas of adding smart drives to them and running from batteries is quite an interesting idea.

This is one mans attempt
This one is way past my abilities but it does bear scrutiny I think. This fellow is able to get right down underneath the OS and do the bios stuff which I kinda wish I’d got into all those years ago, but I didn’t, but it shouldn’t be too hard to build something using an old computer then attaching a smart drive box and having the ‘puter boot from it.

What I find intensely interesting is that while these things may be completely beyond most peoples abilities to put together themselves it also means that whats done in the shed this year will most probably be on the shelves at Harvey Normans next year… or the year after!

Oh, I am so behind the times….

This post is dated 2007!
But it’s also still available as a kitset.

This ones available from a company in Canada, and Mums going there in a coupla months.

For starters I should be out welding to make some more money but earlier this morning I loaded the programs I got with the UCA222 behringer audio interface and realised, after playing a wee bit in the program Audacity, that I’ve got to start from scratch and relearn the stuff I learnt years ago when I was last playing with sound on PC’s using Cool edit. One option is to install Cool edit and see if it works under XP, and maybe save a little time while the other option, which I think might be better in the long run, is to reformat the disk and start over with Linux.

I had my laptop sorted the other day by this old fellow, the mute button in Windows media player was defaulted, and he gave me a runthrough of Linux Ubuntu and the simple fact that in loading Ubuntu for the first time, while connected to broadband, it’ll access the net and go searching for all the drivers the machine it’s on will need… thats just got to be easier than the constant hassle of loading drivers through Windows.

Much more research to do before I jump in but these sites seem to be a good start.
How to do it
And whats available under Linux

I was a bit late in the whole PC internet revolution, started computing in 2000 on Win 98SE and now at the junction of actively choosing whether to soldier on with XP or jump to the front of the cue and join the open source revolution, quite possibly at a time when it’s just crossed from total nerdville into code dumb user viability, then that which scares one the most may actually be the best option. Actually staying with windows scares me the most whereas jumping to Linux and starting again from the ground up excites me.

Excites me almost as much as what my Good Friend Felix is up to

Heres a screenshot of a DAW called Ardour that can run on Linux… just so theres a picture to end with.

If anything I suppose I’m changing back to the underdogs as the service providers, slingshot and vodaphone, were the underdogs when I first did internet and mobiles but now I’m going to Orcon and 2degrees… as well as changing to Linux as my operating system on the new ‘puter.

I think it’s important to do things like this, for obvious reasons and also for the less obvious ones. Obvious is that they offer better service as they build up their… what the word.. corporate identity? nope thats wrong… you know, their public personna… better, anyways the newer companies have to build a reputation for reliabitlty so they work harder, just like me who’s just had my first art show in years and years and my first one for decades in a dealer gallery. I’m not sitting on the pigs back and just counting the money comin’ in. I’m aware I have to build up a reputation for reliability and keep getting better. I’m an underdog even if my works as good as the big dogs, maybe even better… I’m unproven in the market… so I gotta work hard and fast and do work that keeps giving long after I’ve been paid and the monies are spent.

Less obviously and beyond the boundaries of realism and pragmatism is the idealism of the thing and this should come first but its less obvious in todays climate of capitalism but much more important to me. Idealism should always be the first motivation, in my book, and should be supported by pragmatic notions so the gestalt or even dialectic occuring is one that grows stronger with time and input. Idealism supporting pragmatism is like water going down a drainhole, ever diminishing circles with the only end being going down the hole.

So the smaller companies trying to build empires are fuelled by an idealism the bigger companies have lost while the whole area of open source software is a new paradigm where the pragmatism of the economy has been replaced by ideals supported by a pragmatism of a wholely new set of parameters… the ideas behind open source are far more organic and tied to a sense of reality where unbridled capitalism has had it’s day and the new way is that we have more than enough and now we have time to spread the advantages that we’ve been able to acheive. It’s the third wave in Toffler speak.

So what has all this to do with changing internet providers, mobile network providers and using open source software. We vote with our economic choices in a global economy. Where our money goes our power goes along for the ride. This is the idealism and supporting that is that the underdog works harder to provide and in doing so we pragmatically end up with better tools.

Case in point was that I have a new laptop that came with XP but minus the drivers for the machine. I understand that. The guys I got it from reformatted the hard drive and loaded XP which is the easiest way to get something workin’ and be able to sell it cheap. He left it to me to download 100Mb of drivers and wait for the ‘puter to install them through multiple restarts and bloody boring boring clicking through menus that windows seems to be so good at. Bang, all thats done so I try the thing with CD’s and DVD’s and I get the pictures, in windows media player, but no sound. Now if you know windows then you’ll be aware of the control panel and all those circling sub menus that lead to driver enabling and back to the devive managers… unending!

My point being that everything was enabled and all the sound mixer settings for record and playback were saying they were working. Turns out that the windows media player has two sets of volume controls and the second one is beneath the obvious one on the skin… it’s at the bottom of the play menu?, not tools, but play and it’s default muted.
Okay, in a round about way I can see the advantages of that but it’s a typical windowy type thing that can take hours of pissing about just to figure out. It’s stupid!

So it now plays wave files, CD’s etc, but hasn’t got sound on DVD’s and I can’t be bothered with trying to understand loading a bunch of video codecs to media player… I’ve just downloaded VLC and until I do a little more research on compatibile programs for LInux I’ll go with XP.
One thing I have found, though, over time is that the ability to make these changes, which used to dreadfully painful back at the beginning of this century, are now very streamlined and simple to manoeuvre (had to look that up) through. The result of competition keepin’ the old boys on their toes as the underdogs streamline things to make things easier for new callups to the front.

Now down to the nitty gritty. To be able to record on the fly, which really interests me, I’ve got two tiny little Behringer condensor mics that run on phantom power and I’ve also got a Paia schematic for the 9407 tube mic pre which uses a 12AX7 tube and a bunch of opamps and a 4049cmos chips as a way to take a 15VDC input and make it into 48VDC for the phantom power and a reasonable voltage for the tube anodes. The whole thing runs on 12VAC so my only constraint is to be able to modify the schematic to run on something using batteries. My initial hope was to be to use the power available on a USB port which is 5VDC but that just ain’t going to do it for me so maybe I’ll go to a pack of 9V rechargables and by using 4 I could get +18 and -18 or even two 12V sealed lead acid rechargables for +12 and -12 which would be cheaper but a little bulkier.

Then with a good battery in the laptop feeding that and the AD/DA of the Behringer UCA222. Then the Paia tube pre and some batteries and the two Behringer mics I’ve got the absolutely excellent way to record noises in the enviroment… like my drive into town to do Vitamin S and then playing it as background when I perform…

Easier and possibly what I’d actually do first off is use this other condensor I have that runs off one 1.5V battery and have a simple mic pre like I put on a previous post running on about 10V and using the USB with a simple voltage doubler… which ain’t so simple as one has to convert DC to AC with 4049 oscillators then double it as per normal… but still that’d be a tiny little box.

On a more pragmatic note, but still driven by Idealism of course, I’m instrument making today. I got a good sized Wok from Super trash and because I’ve already got one at home I’m going to weld them together for a sound chamber and then weld up a neck for a stringed instrument. There are multiple little incidences that are driving this, as I suppose one could say that the miracle of Idealism is that it is often parallel’d with multiple coincidence or should I say Seredipity, and it started with a very old friend coming round, Chris of the original Burgeria fame, wanting to build a guitar from a hubcap and seeking my advice, Ivan ringing me about… why did he ring?, initially he offered me an’ ol’ Roland sequencer, oh, thats right, my impressions of Ema at Fresh gallery in Otara, after he met her somewheres and she said he could put forward a… forgotten the word, um, well, an exhibition plan… but then, during the call, we ended up talking about using weed cutter nylon as strings for instruments and I’d had that cross my mind a few days ago and then seeing a Sitar up close in an indian clothing shop in Papatoetoe during my walk from the train station after arriving back in town from the Friday night spent on Waiheke to see Felix’s band Harmonica Lewinsky, who didn’t actually play because he got sick, but was still an enjoyable foray into the land of the ever diminishing Hippy alternative Chic, and then actually buying the Wok at Super trash…what’yr going to do but go out and start welding after all those gentle nudges!
And after reading through all of the above I’d be an absolute bastard if I didn’t offer something actually useful and inspiring wouldn’t I?
Given to me by Bryan of the Mojave desert who enjoys, like I do, swapping little packets of real silicon, and a little germanium, across the Great and Noble Pacific Ocean.

Instruments for childrens museums
I love the Chimosaur and can’t wait to see one strapped to my roofrack!

Meaning suddenly.. I’ll have a digital recording system I can tote from place to place. Saw one of those tiny little notbooks a little while back and wondered about the ability to record with them. Was in at the computer shop, next to a music shop in Manukau, and went from one to the other till I had it sussed. Then I’m at home debating the approx 700 bucks it’ll set me back when I decide that trademe might have second hand laptops at reasonable prices… long story short I’m meeting a guy in a carpark in highland park, by countdown, in just under two hours, to hand over 400 bucks for a Toshiba M5…(so when it comes to myth making, as in the artists career steps, a little innocent cloak and dagger allusions never go amiss).

But I gotta have the ability to A/D any signals and yesterday at the shop I had in the back of my mind that since the last time I looked at this stuff there’ll be something out there for less than 100 bucks that’ll take a line level and change it to USB. The guys in the shop weren’t really up with my requirements but I did spot what I wanted in the Behringer catalog.

In the photo the red thing on the right is a Behringer UCA 222 which is USB powered and Audio/Digital converter with line level, RCA, ins and outs and a headphone jack for monitoring and a wee volume control + spdif optical which makes it a surprisingly adaptable little box for 99 bucks clean bought off the internet and picked up from the north shore this morning. Buy now is good! The things capable of a little bit better than CD at 16bit and 48kHz. While I was at Dr Music on the shore I happened to see he had a BSY600 Behringer Bass synth and I’ve been after one for about two days after reading about them on DIYstomboxes. Guy who likes my stuff on there had just gotten one and enjoyed the experience and it’s an almost direct copy of the Boss Bass Synth which another fellow from Vit S uses to great effect with a throat mic and hand held carbon mic. Two days ago there were no BSY600’s that I could find and eventually put 50 bucks down on one of six coming into the country hopefully by the end of next week. Helps when you want something so you do what you can then forget about it.

Above is just half or even a quarter of the whole story that I followed up after various things struck my fancy but the sum total being that my versatility with musical stuff, tool wise, has just expanded expotentially with the minimum of effort and tons of coincidence plus a budget well within what I can afford. Trust hunches and follow your luck blindly!!!

But thats not all folks!!! because out of the blue I also got a message that there was some old gear waiting for me that I’d completely forgotten about and even knew what it was… Two old tape, solid state, decks, one reel to reel and the other casette and this fine old specimen of absolute quality from the mid sixties.

Two AB1 output P/P fixed bias tube amps with 9 x 12AX7’s and a few signal pentodes. What a great score and to make things even better the output tubes are 7868’s which are a Novel version of Octal 7591’s which are some of the most sought after power amp tubes when it comes to being tough, dependable and musical. The 7591 is the “to die for” tube for harp players amps and they were made right at the end of the tube technology thing and so are almost the ultimate tube!

Now all I gotta do is live up to the luck I’ve been given…

I admit it… the mic pre was almost right and the idea for a compressor was just plain silly!
But I published them at DIYstompboxes and was told, by PRR, how to do it properly.

As you can see the pot has been moved to the emitter and therefore sets gain. Big signals wre just hitting the rails because the amplification was at 100 which is too much. This way the gain can be set anywhere between 8 and 100 which is a much better way to do things.

PRR at DIYstomboxes then kindly threw together an LED driver and put the LDR in a place where it’d work. Then I, always a twiddler and asker of questions, have published the above with the addition of pots and a trimmer to be able to tailor the compression somewhat.

Hopefully the 10k across the diode kinda allows turn on to occur when you want it to so would be attack I suppose. Lower resistances to ground would allow the smaller signals to go to ground and keep the LED from lighting until higher signal crossed that threshold… so maybe it’s a threshold control…
Then the 100k would allow the overall resistance to ground, and therefore the voltage divider between the 5.1k resistor and the resistance of the LDR leg to be set and therefore the amount of compression. The LDR thats gonna work has a dark resistance of about 1M and will go to about 5k at full light. Adding 100k means the overall resistance to ground would only go up 10% but the resistance at full light could be 5k to 105k, against the 5.1k resistor and so set compression from 50% to about 5%. The trimmer allows one to tailor the resistance curve accross the LDR somewhat while also making the dark resistance of 1M somewhat insignificant as a high impedance.

It’s still mostly untried yet though so maybe the resistances of the pots and trimmers could be better at other resistances. The trimmer might be better at 100k or even 250k while the 100k could be a 50k pot over a 50k resistor.

Good Golly… does this mean I have to breadboard something?

First though, I’m gonna change the mic pre I’ve already built and take the 100k pot off the end and relace the emitter resistor with a pot and a bigger cap of 100uf.

Right now though, I’m going to go accross town to pick up a broken stylophone beatbox. I’ll try and fix it but mainly I want to have a good look inside and get the schematic… hopefully it’s not SMD and digital in any way but as simple and straight forward as the original stylophone.

The little Mic Preamp works well but singers would have to do the old moving of the mic for big signals as in move the mic away when you go large and bring it in real close for whispers…. which is all well and good if the microphone is being held by someone competant in that way but can be rather nasty if sent into clipping all the time a peak goes through.

If it’s statically picking up sound pressure from a source with lots of dynamics then problems are going to occur and some form of anti logarythmic amplification is required, ie; compression.

The signal source gets louder and so the amplification goes down. One of the easiest way to acheive such things, and given I’m seriously vacant when it comes to what really can be acheived with electronics know how, is to use LED’s and LDR’s. The signal gets changed to a voltage and that lights an LED which in turn effects an LDR, which is a light dependant resistor. The LED gets bright, big signal, and the resistance through the LDR gets lower. The simplest way to do this would be to split the signal at the output of any amplifier and have the signal going out also fed through an LED and have an LDR across the volume pot so if the signal is big the LED lights and the lower resistance in the LDR across the pot brings the signal closer to ground and therefore siphons some off.
Though this is simple it is fraught with complications and would rely on having the right LED and, even harder, the right LDR which may or may not exist. So what we do is add an ability to taper those effects to our needs and this is what I’ll try to do with the schematic below.

Basically you set P1 and P2 so that low signals come through uneffected but as medium signals come in a little compression is added by LDR 2 getting lower in resistance and adding negative feedback to T3 therefore lowering it’s input signal and therefore the output signal.

But peaks still might be too great and end up cutting out the signal altogether so what you do, which seems somewhat counter intuitive, is bring in signal from P3, which up until now has been grounded, and slightly decrease the signal to LDR 2 by way of increasing the resistance of P1 and P2 thereby having less initial compression but allowing more for the peaks.

Now I’ll, well not right now, breadboard it to see whether it’ll even work.

Friend of mine needs a mic pre and I’ve been buying a bunch of the jaycar $5.00 1k/8 ohm signal transformers so I thought I’d throw something together using one of these and a transistor.

I was in Dominion Rd and the antique place we all know and love because of it’s absolute abundance had the usual boxes out front full of cheapies and I happened to have a look through the old watch and ring and necklace boxes… and found one or two metal ones. The above, after some work to remove all the sticky crud inside and out, made quite an interesting enclosure thats speaks volume as metaphor!

As you can see it’s a very simple schematic. Given a 600 ohm microphone on the 8 ohm winding the impedance ratio becomes 600/70k which is good for hitting the base of the transistor. Some tweaking of values might get even better S/N and bandwidth but it pretty darn good with the guesstimates I used. The transistor is a BC546 which was on the bench and I didn’t check the hfe but anywhere fro 200-500 will work. The hardest part was the switching for the battery. If a plugpack is used it switches out the battery but even that won’t allow the circuit to power up until the signal output is plugged in. That means batteries won’t drain unless you leave it plugged into something… Complicated explaining it and even more complicated wiring it up.
I’m going to make some in some pie tin enclosures I’ve got, which really are tin coated steel, and I’ve even thought about well made big wooden and alloy boxes with a choice old knob… containing a point to point wiring job and then seeing if I can sell them on trade me for a silly price. I like the idea of really neat looking enclosures with a kind of vintage aesthetic… and really simple circuits!

Jumpin’ off the bandwagon, that has been the building of various music related things, to do the artworks for the show, has given me a little breathing space and a chance, therefore, to review where I’m going with my instrument building.
As well, theres the fact that I’ve been going to handmade most Wednesday nights, maybe even tonight, and playing basically the same setup each time and somewhat getting my chops together using that setup of basically acoustic soundmaker into preamps then the looper (RC-2) followed, or preceded by, the delay (DD-7) and this time of really trying to dig the most out of a basically unchanging setup has got me thinking about my whole approach to instrument building.

Basically it comes down to about three catagories that I can spend time on, not including the actual performance issues but alluding to them as the primary motivation… if indeed it is the primary motivation,and they are instrument making, preamp and amp making and signal processing or effects.
Sound generation, sound modification and sound reinforcement. The sound generation can be broken down into the two categories of electronic and acoustic and to a certain extent this is the case with modification, with electronic being predominant but acoustic being somewhat more interesting, and while this is the overall breakdown the ways in which these sound articles come into being can be further broken down into the areas of mechanical and electronic by defining the working methods to bring things into being.

So an amplifier is basically electronic but its construction is mainly mechanical as it needs to be in an enclosure of some sort and this enclosure needs to be able to hold all the parts and be reliable in doing its job. The thing is I’m realising that the mechanical part of making all this stuff is, by far, of a much greater interest to me than the electronics, except for valve amps which, because of the nature of the components, is quite mechanical as regards the building thereof.

This is all to say that as I tidy up the big mess left over from creating artworks I’m thinking about, instead of launching into a bunch of circuit board etching to create more sound modifiers that don’t actually do much, I’d be far better off attending to unfinished projects of a more mechanical nature.

Last monday night I did Vitamin S with an assortment of tubes! Not vacuum tubes but real tubes as in various lengths of plastic from thick black drainage pipe that are used in under-road supply and waste, 3 lengths at 150mm x at least 2mtrs long, plus some plastic tubing that fabric sellers roll up on, 60mm dia, and some 30mm conduit for electrical supplies. I tied most of it to the roofracks on my car and took in a hammer, pliers, a few lengths of wood and a roll of wire and when I arrived I put it altogether into an instrument vaguely like those built for the from scratch ensemble all those years ago… and it was great fun!

The artwork creation has lifted my head above the musical instrument making and I’m realising that all I wanna do is have fun!

This is gonna take some thinking. Number one I want to explore more of the acoustic properties of instrument making and spend less time on the electronics and knob twiddling. I want to be more in tune with the possibilities of performance as regards the instruments and how I move around them during performance… as opposed to just sitting on my ass and leaning over things.

But, and theres always a but, there is always the compromise one needs to make with any making of things in that they all need to be transported and stored before and after use. I’ve never been worried about artworks because they either sell or I end up giving them away but these instruments put me in the region of keeping the stuff, which has never been a problem before but after a year or two of instrument making they are starting to take up quite a bit of space… And I’m realising they need to built tough to stay functioning through the vagaries of transporting and storing them from place to place.

But it’s almost midday and the money will be in the bank so this time wasting charade is almost over and I can go out into the world and buy more shit I don’t really need.

A functioning Phillips radiogram with EL86 output tubes for $66.00, and an idea for an amp that uses the radio which is mixed through a ring modulator with a high impedance signal input. Those big plate capacitors, which are the tuning dials for the radio could be replaced with a theremin type body capacitance input…

And a whip antenna at 1-3mtrs to do the VLF stuff…

Spent yesterday afternoon rehearsing a little piece with the looper, and mainly voice, but it didn’t really work so I went to the theatre in Point Chevalier for the Ten Acre Block performance, as part of something gleefully called “Original Orifice” (which, by default makes me think that a performance in future could be called Anemic Artifice…not this one but just as a name for something that explores the artiness so inherent in art performance) knowing, pretty much, I wouldn’t be performing a solo.

So I get there and find a place to set up and it’s near a power point so alls good but by the time I set up, as I start from the outside and work in so the power cords are always last, the power point I wanted is gone and the nearest available is a lighting circuit which kinda irked my but I’m never one to cause a fuss so I plugged into that. Then my pedal power supply won’t work and keeps knida dimming out the pedals. So I end up taking out the pedals, which means I definitely can’t do a solo (no looper) and fire everything and it works good… so I power down and wait for the show…

Show starts and my power disappears… The lighting circuit was dimmed. So the hint I got with the pedal power supply coming in and out should’ve had me abandoning the lighting circuit. Seems the circuit of the dimmer was working in conjunction with the switch mode supply for my pedals and creating a low frequency tremolo. All the other amps and supplies worked because they’re all transformers at 50Hz but the switch mode supplies use high frequencies to get a DC current…blah, blah, blah.

So problems with switch mode supplies means you’re on a lighting circuit with a dimmer. Anyways nights of failure aren’t a worry, success and failure being flip sides of the coin that overall means learning, and if anything the smile on ones face during success can be a big wall for learning to get over… so maybe lots of failure is good… actually its really good, mistakes are the spice for the basic ingredients of success!

So heres a pretty little circuit that allows one to hear very low frequencies. Very low magnetic waves transformed into audio frequency.

and it comes from this page
The 160mH choke can be the primary from a Jcar 1k/8 ohm output transformer just like they mention the radio shack 1k/8. As for the other mentions of chokes on the input and as a high pass filter after the 160mH choke, at 100-150mH to get rid of 50Hz hum from power lines, your on your own as they are quite difficult to get hold of as straight chokes but the 1k/8 ohm might work in those places as well.

The 2N3819 fet is used in boss pedals as the switches to bypass and can be gotten from RS but I’d think just about any audio frequency fet would do. Likewise the transitor on the end could be a BC547. The antenna is a bit of a mystery but I suppose it’s just an ordinary telescopic type at three mtrs but maybe a three mtr length of wire would do as it’s the length that counts.

Now go out into the world and listen to the ripples of remorse in the magnetosphere!